Does Wallpaper Decrease System Performance?

[SacrificialSoldier]

I just made a poll on weither or not people use wallpaper and got a landslide of yeses!

https://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=542787

now I was wondering.

I thought that if there is no wallpaper your PC goes faster as every time you minimize a window it has to load only one pixel color while if there is a wallpaper image then it has to load all thoes pixels every time.

Misconception on my part? Or is there some truth in the myth?

[jordanspringer]

I just made a poll on weither or not people use wallpaper and got a landslide of yeses!

https://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=542787

now I was wondering.

I thought that if there is no wallpaper your PC goes faster as every time you minimize a window it has to load only one pixel color while if there is a wallpaper image then it has to load all thoes pixels every time.

Misconception on my part? Or is there some truth in the myth?

You are absolutly correct. Having wallpapers would decrease system preformance. I know this because my friend is using (believe it or not) a Pentium 1 - 133mhz computer running windows 98. Having a fullscreen wallpaper takes maybe 5 full seconds to minimize windows, because it has to loadthe wallpaper. Having a plain background, the windows minimize like normal.

I think this really is a non-issue these days with computers we have today, but just to answer your question, i'm pretty sure it reduces preformance, but if you have a good computer, its not worth mentioning.

[+Tantawi Subscriber²]

Just to add to jordanspringer's reply, the performance impact of wallpapers is much like the performance impact of desktop icons, taskbar, quick launch, etc. They're essential and worth the soooooo tiny effect (that's on a P2 or less CPU anyway).

[SacrificialSoldier]

but if you have a good computer, its not worth mentioning.

That's what I thought!

Thanks

S2

[raskren]

Wallpapers are converted to bitmaps and loaded into memory. The only instance where this would cause a performance hit is on a machine with an extremely limited amount of memory. Excessive paging would result as the wallpaper is loaded back into main memory when foreground applications are closed or minimized.

If you install Windows XP on a 64 MB machine, the wallpaper is disabled by default...there's a reason for that.

CPU power really isn't a factor here.

[SacrificialSoldier]

Thank you for that raskren

very helpfull

[chavo]

The system has to draw the background whether it's one color or millions. Of course one color image is going to use less ram, but it doesn't come at no expense. It's still going to use ram. Just make a bmp image the size of your screen and you'll see how much ram it takes up. For example making a one color image 1280x1024 and saving it as bmp in mspaint it is 3.75MB. Making an image using many color will result in about 4-5MB size. Not much difference in size.

[SacrificialSoldier]

yeah I guess, you are right about the siZe thing

still debating whether of not to use em

S2

[zmysta]

making a one color image 1280x1024 and saving it as bmp in mspaint it is 3.75MB. Making an image using many color will result in about 4-5MB size

bitmaps are uncompressed and so content does not affect file size, resolution does. only compressed formats like jpeg and png take into account the actual content.

[Krome]

Many above post mention almost everything but you have to combine all those together to understand how much resouces the computer take.

Computer draws graphics using vector base clipping. When you open a new windows on top of the windows, the clipping becomes more and more fragmented in the cache or known as pagefile area. If you have enough RAM, these cache are not stored on the pagefile area but instead active memory. The color bit plane also a factor in speed when the pixels and bit plane are used for the first time. The other factor is the computational speed needs to recalculate the clipping area every time a clipping area is cleared off from active memory.

The process of clipping is calculate the rectangular size and area, store that clipping area in memory, and draw a new clipping on top of that. And that takes resources and yeah a little processing speed.